Off-Site Services is an award-winning web development and consulting firm providing strategic services to our partners

ADA requirements for consumer-facing websites are supposed to go into effect in 2018, but some are starting early.  Winn-Dixie built their website in 2015 and has now earmarked quarter of a million dollars to make it ADA compliant, based on recent court ruling.

Link - https://www.courthousenews.com/judge-holds-winn-dixie-supermarkets-website-violates-ada/

Same as anyone remotely involved with IT, I get bombarded with unending streams of daily emails, calls, and feeds promising superior offshoring, nearshoring and all other kinds of remote technical help for fraction of what it should cost.  Being a polite person, I occasionally respond to these sales pitches and over the years have come to gauge fairly well the background of these companies just from the way their sales pitch is crafted.

Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is slated to become a legal requirement for websites selling goods or services directly to the public starting in 2018.  There are already plenty of good resources for identifying code-based compliance, but image compliance is a trickier matter.  As a quick solution, we put together a Color Check tool that in two clicks allows you to select foreground and background colors and performs contrast validation on selected colors in accordance with ADA requirements.

Introduction

User experience testing is a crucial element of web quality assurance.   One UX testing solution we use internally is a Selenium IDE plugin for Firefox, which allows you to record interactions with multiple elements and multiple web pages, organize recorded tests into sets (suites) and save them for future use.  Below is a screenshot showing Selenium IDE popup that appears in Firefox after plugin is installed and activated, with test cases organized on the left, playback and recording controls on the top, actions being recorded in the main content area on the left and

This instruction will be useful for anyone who has to test new website being build, or website being transferred to new server, prior to DNS change when all you have is a new website's IP address.  You can make changes on your local machine to associate web address (URL) with known IP address and test how the website performs when called via that URL.  Once local settings are changed, the website is ready to be tested in web browser on your local machine with its actual URL.

— With sufficient resources in place, we can now shorten the "baby" timeline to 1 month!

This is what happens when Drupal or WordPress security updates are ignored - nothing.  Yet again, maybe your website gets hacked, malicious code is inserted into page templates, and next thing you know, you’re in the business of selling Motilium, as happened recently on an actual website we had to fix.

If you get swamped with tasks, let your slacker colleagues see your workload and take up some of the burden.  Whether they’ll do it is another matter entirely.

Tip of the hat to Bryan Kuester for suggesting this feature.